Friday, 29 March 2013

DOING WHAT YOU'RE TOLD: COMPLIANCE, LONDON FILM FEST HIT ON RELEASE

Compliance, which has
just opened this week, was one of the best films in the 2012 London
Film Festival. The strange thing about it is that, even among an
audience less film literate, less armed with press kits, and less
dedicated than the one I saw it with at the LFF preview, everyone
seems to know the premise going in (and if you don't know it, stop
reading right now, and come back after you've seen the movie!).

The premise is that the
manager of a fast-food branch gets a call from the police telling her
that they've had a complaint from someone who's had money stolen from
their purse by one of the Chick-Wich counter staff. The manager,
Sandra, is told to in effect take the girl, Becky, into custody, and
from that point the voice on the telephone manipulates a series of
more and more serious humiliations for Becky, involving other staff
members and even Sandra's boyfriend.

Now we all know what's
going on; we've heard about the film and/or about the real events
that inspired it. Some of us knew about the Stanley Milgram experiments,
conducted at Yale in 1961, which involved testing people's obedience
to authority by requiring them to administer electrical shocks to
subjects in an experiment. If you knew the procedure of that, you
would recognise the gradually increasing resistance being overcome by
an equally increasing assertion of authority, playing on submissive
doubt.

Compliance accepts all
that, and copes with it very well. It adopts a sort of thriller
format—yet the reveal is relatively early in the film, making the
thriller aspect the question of just how far the staff will go, and
how far the perpetrator will push, and indeed, whether he will get
away with it, even to the point where Becky gets spanked—a sort of
literal Milgram shock. The format only works on its own terms but
also serves to put the audience into the same frame of mind as the
staff: they are constantly checking their own reactions, perhaps, but
not necessarily aware, that they are being manipulated in a manner
not that far removed from the staff. After all, we surrender to the
film-maker's authority and believe their version of reality.

It's also helped by
some fine casting, particularly Ann Dowd as Sandra. This is
also a movie about work, and the pressures of minimum-wage life in
America; fear of losing a job is a great way to create a docile
work-force, a reinforcement of obdience to authority in itself.
Sandra may be one of life's losers, an adult dressed in a child's outfit, but she is also one of life's
believers—a clear contrast to her workforce, who realise they are
in a dead-end and are slackers as a result. She's matched perfectly
by the hangdog features of Bill Camp as her 'fiance' Van, he conveys a 'not quite there'
aspect that makes him perfect, particularly as he uses in all the
wrong ways the sudden influence of authority granted him. Dreama
Walker as Becky is also very good, conveying the right mix of
not-quite beauty and not-quite confidence.

Pat Healy as 'Officer
Daniels' is interesting. He's presented carefully as a kind of
cliched Nazi, a Dr Mengele by phone, and he smokes, always a sign of
extreme detachment from society's mores nowadays. But his voice is
very much like the comedian Bob Newhart's, and Newhart's most famous
routines involved his doing one side of phone calls between famous
people, God and Noah, or Elizabeth I and Walter Raleigh. It's almost
like sending the audience (at least that part old or savvy enough to
recall Newhart) an additional reminder something else is going on.

Craig Zobel, who both
wrote and directed, brings out the flatness, the primary colour drab,
of his characters' lives, and cinematographer Adam Stone reinforces
that with his use of shadowy spaces which signal an existential
dilemma: when Becky is in the office/store room, it's a like a
situation from a Sartre play. Their detachment from each other, the
gap into which the phone cop intercedes. It takes the outsider to
the group, Van, to realise what's going on. And when they do, the
real cops seem too close to the pervert for comfort. In the end, we
feel, the perversion and the experimentation are themselves too
similar, and the movie and the events as well.

A postscript shows us
what happens in 'real' life. Sandra lost Van, and her job. The
fast-food chain was sued for not 'protecting' and employee, as if
there were a training session or seminar that would be relevant to a
fast-food manager's career. The suit further drove the staff apart,
but it was the experiment that had already done that. And when asked,
in the ugfaux-psychology of TV chat shows, whether she was
'brain-washed', Sandra replies, 'I did what I was told to do'.

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